Sunland Review

July 20, 2025

Sunland Review

14th-20th July – Riverside Studios, 28th-30th July – Lion and Unicorn Theatre

It was a very hot and sunny evening in Hammersmith. Riverside Studios was bustling with people enjoying a crisp glass of Rosé as the early evening sunshine beamed through the big glass windows. For the last couple of weeks, Riverside Studios has been hosting Bitesize, a festival which celebrates all things new, providing inspiring and innovative theatre makers with an opportunity to showcase their work, and next in the running order is SUNLAND.

“The use of silence was powerful, and the dialogue struck a perfect balance between anxiety, frustration, humour and wit.”

The world is on the edge of extinction read the first line of the blurb and if you’ve been unlucky enough to travel on the Victoria Line in the last couple of weeks, it certainly feels that way, so a play about four friends stranded at a Thai beach resort waiting for the world to end sounded relatively apt.

As the audience piled into Studio 3, we were greeted with red flashing lights, the distant crackles of a radio and a bloodied bag of the finest-quality, superior long grain rice, all of which helped build the tension as we waited for the play to start.

From the very beginning to the almost very end, as the tension grew, so did the audience’s discomfort, and while there is a very strong argument to be made for the fact that waiting for the world to end would be very traumatic, I would argue that the play was unnecessarily so.

It just felt like a lot of bad things were happening for happening’s sake and there wasn’t enough context, leaving the audience confused.

The Arc, which was orbiting the earth and housing the “best, brightest and richest of humanity” who were waiting for the asteroid to pass, was a significant part of the story. While the idea was clever and very interesting, there wasn’t much cohesion with what was going on and it’s something I would have liked them to explore more – although I did like the idea of people lying in their graves, flipping off millionaires.

That being said, there were some very impressive moments. The use of silence was powerful, and the dialogue struck a perfect balance between anxiety, frustration, humour and wit. There were certain moments which really made the audience laugh and the highlight for me was when one of the four described themselves as realist. “You’re not a realist”, replied another. “You’re a c**t”.